When I was a little kid, my mom would sometimes drag me to her Weight Watchers meetings. I remember them as dull and depressing. I would punch holes in styrofoam coffee cups with my thumbs while waiting for her to be weighed in. Everything about the culture made me sad—especially the tiny white plastic scale she used to measure her portions and the breakfasts of cantaloupe and fat-free cottage cheese.

I've since joined Weight Watchers myself, several times, and each time I've resented it: the bland conference rooms and fluorescent lights; the small talk shared with people with whom I have nothing in common other than a desire to be smaller; the repetition of common sense advice I already know but am not heeding; the admission to myself that I've made choices that have allowed me to get to place that doesn't feel good to me. But there have been moments when I felt like my eating habits and body needed a reset or a jumpstart, and Weight Watchers was familiar, time-tested, and provided a structure under which I can—and do—lose weight, even while I sort of hate it.

But I've never hated Weight Watchers as much as I did when I was there to lose the weight I'd gained during a pregnancy with a baby who died.

There are many difficult moments to endure when you have a stillborn. There's the birth itself, of course: intense and somber, with no beautiful, squalling newborn at the end. There's the day your milk comes in, your breasts painfully hard with no baby to nurse at them. There's calls to funeral homes for burial arrangements, things you never imagined you'd do for an infant. There are the hours spent putting baby clothes into boxes to give away. There's the morning when, at daycare pick-up for your older kid, a well-meaning acquaintance who doesn't know what's happened spots you across the street and calls out cheerfully, "Where's the baby?" and, caught off guard, you call back with equal cheer, "He's dead!"

And there is the moment when the cashier at the grocery store smiles at you and asks, "When's the baby due?" and you realize that you gained 25 pounds during your pregnancy, and most of those pounds are still there, visible on your body—but that the baby that was supposed to be there is not.

"I wanted to emerge as a person with an intact mind and heart."

When my son died in utero at 31 weeks at the end of 2007, I made a conscious decision not to let it shatter me completely. I sensed that I could be shattered, and I didn't want to be. I wanted to be an attentive mother to my toddler, a kind partner to my supportive husband, a writer with the ability to make art from the sorrow, and a helpful resource for others enduring similar heartbreak. I wanted to emerge as a person with an intact mind and heart. I chose to try to be as present as I possibly could be for the experience, to attempt to embrace, rather than run away from, what I was facing.

I did all this, and I think I did it pretty gracefully, for the most part. But one of the places where I failed was at Weight Watchers.

Generally speaking, food and I get along pretty well: I really like to eat it, and I mostly don't beat myself up for doing so. My body and I get along pretty well, too: I enjoy it, feel grateful for it, work with it, and spend a relatively minimal amount of time hating it.

For the last two decades or so, ever since adulthood, I've mostly weighed between 142-155 pounds. Sometimes I weigh a little more, and sometimes that little bit more adds up over time until I get to a place where I don't like how I feel and all my clothes stop fitting, and then I do something about it. Sometimes—if I am steadily being exceedingly careful about what I eat and and going to the gym and running several times a week—I weigh a little bit less. It seems pretty clear to me that my body likes to be within this range, and the only times I've gone well outside it has been the three times I've gotten pregnant.

"I was mad because something bad had happened to me, and now the weight felt like something else bad that happened to me."

I was probably 170 or so when I joined Weight Watchers after the stillbirth. And I was pissed. I was mad because I'd gained this weight in a healthy way, for a healthy reason, but had nothing but the pounds to show for it, and now I was going to have to do the work to lose them. I was mad because I knew the weight wasn't just going to float away overnight on its own accord, and here I was having to be all responsible and effortful about it when all I wanted to do was get back into bed and sob. I was mad because something bad had happened to me, and now the weight felt like something else bad that happened to me, and sitting in a Weight Watchers meeting looking at a poster about about calories and fiber felt like a third bad thing. I was mad because, in my grief, I wanted to pamper and indulge myself. I knew I could train myself to think about exercise and salads as a loving way to take good care of my precious body—but this knowledge competed with a desire to tell the whole world to go to hell.

I hadn't ever thought Why me? about the loss of my son: I knew that sometimes babies die for no reason, and I felt accepting of that fact. I didn't blame myself or anyone else for his death. But I felt an enormous sense of Why me? at Weight Watchers. I didn't want to stand on the electronic scale every week. I didn't want to stop eating cookies. I didn't want to sit at a sushi restaurant with a cardboard card, calculating the points of my maki roll. My baby had died. It wasn't fair. It wasn't fucking fair.

In Weight Watchers meetings, all the anger and stress and sorrow of my stillbirth rose to the surface. While I listened to other people discuss quinoa and elliptical machines, I felt myself fume and glower. While people talked about giving into the temptation of a candy bar, I raged. When the staff tried to be kind to me, sticking a little gold star in my weigh-in book, I'd lift my tear-stained face to meet theirs and give them a look of pure fury. When it came time to share our successes and challenges, I would spit out the story of the baby who had died and then glare around the room defiantly, as if to say, Top that, you jerks. I sucked all the air out of the room. My meeting leader didn't know what to say. No one did, and I reveled in their discomfort.

And yet I kept at the program, mostly because the alternative—surrendering to despair and self-pity—held no appeal and no reward. Some days it took all the fortitude I had just to sing my daughter her lullabye at bedtime. I didn't want to waste any of the energy I managed to muster feeling bad about how my clothes fit, or what I saw in the mirror. Seven months of pregnancy had brought on this weight, and I didn't want it to take more than seven months to undo it. If I couldn't have something that felt like happiness, I could at least have something that felt like achievement. If I couldn't have my baby, at least I could have my body back.

"If I couldn't have my baby, at least I could have my body back."

So I dutifully did the points-counting and drank my many glasses of water. As the brutal Chicago winter unfolded into spring, I took laborious jogs along the lake that got a bit easier each time out. I threw away my stretched-out maternity pajamas. I took my daughter to parent-child swim class. I traveled and saw friends. I kept going to the Weight Watchers meetings, and was given keyrings and other trinkets to mark each new goal attained.

Gradually, the pregnancy pounds came off, and the fury and the deepest parts of the mourning passed, too. By summer, I was digging my cute, size 10 skirts out of a plastic tub that had been put away for years, since before my first pregnancy. I skipped with my daughter through the botanic gardens, rode the carousel with her at the zoo. I shopped in vintage clothing stores and liked what I saw when I looked in the dressing room mirror.

By fall, I was pregnant again, by "accident," sooner than we'd planned. My body began growing, and I had to put away the pink sheath dress and the little navy shorts I'd just bought and prepare once more for 40 or so weeks of discomfort, bliss, exhaustion and promise—only this time, they were accompanied by nagging, low-level fear. What if something terrible happened with this baby, too? I'd been through the ringer, body and soul, and emerged intact, but I wasn't sure I had it in me to weather further loss so soon.

Programs like Weight Watchers encourage us to believe that if we only work a little harder, have more discipline, write down some numbers in tiny ledgers, we will be able to determine the state of our bodies. But pregnancy and birth force us to confront the impermanence and lack of control we have over our physical selves. Our bodies shift and evolve; they grow and shrink, get stronger, get damaged, endure, and sometimes fail. Eventually, all of our bodies will undergo a process that not one of us can control through a system of points or motivational keychains.

That third pregnancy produced another boy. That boy recently turned seven. His small body loves cuddling, is often bouncing on furniture, and possesses great rhythm. I never feel quite as joyful as when our two bodies are enmeshed: when he's pulling my arm by the bracelets while we're hiking through the woods, or when I'm combing his hair after his bath. I made this being: grew him, birthed him, raised him up. His body is and is not mine, and is and is not his own. I watch him grow while edging out of my childbearing years toward some new phase of womanhood I've yet to experience. There's so much we both have yet to do and be in our imperfectly perfect bodies.

Arielle Greenberg is the author of Locally Made Panties. To read an excerpt from the book, click here.

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